Discusses research in the cyberspace era, exploring why academics may be naive about what information they are being allowed to access on the academic databases they rely on for research. Asserts that the real issue of the cyberspace age is the marketing of knowledge. (EV)

Introduces and describes the functions of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) database, a powerful Web-based, full-text, searchable electronic archive that contains early Italian vernacular texts whose composition may be dated prior to 1375. Examples are drawn from scholars in various disciplines who have employed the OVI in support of their…

Presents various levels of criteria for judging the quality of abstracts and abstracting. Requirements for abstracts to be read by humans are compared with requirements for those to be searched by computer. Concludes that the wide availability of complete text in electronic form does not reduce the value of abstracts for information retrieval.…

Examined the search strategies used by researchers and others to search the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database through questionnaires completed by 3,420 users. Results indicate that college professors and educational researchers do a better job searching ERIC, but most end-users should be using better search strategies. (SLD)

Reports on a quantitative categorical analysis of metadata elements in the Dublin Core, VRA (Visual Resource Association) Core, REACH (Record Export for Art and Cultural Heritage), and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) metadata schemas, all of which can be used for organizing and describing images. Introduces a new schema comparison methodology…

Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

Term co-occurrence analysis of INSPEC classification codes and thesaurus terms used to index Medical Informatics literature reveals an information science and technology perspective on the field, to accompany the biomedical perspective previously reported. This study continues the search for a better understanding of the structure of Medical…

This review of research and development work deals with activities specifically related to digital legal deposit. An overview of research activity in the various stages of the deposit process-particularly in digital preservation-follows. Building the infrastructure and pilot depositories are discussed. Issues that are not currently being addressed…

Discusses the strengths and weaknesses of administrative databases, issues with their implementation and data analysis, and effective presentation of their data at different levels in child welfare organizations. Focuses on the development and implementation of Washington state's Children's Administration's administrative database, the Case and…

Discusses how to make instructional improvement decisions using data-based assessment. Describes three steps in using data-based assessment: developing the right questions, collecting and analyzing the data, and providing staff support to make effective use of the data. Effective use of assessment data requires both quality data and sufficient…

This column describes ways to streamline and optimize how a Web site works in order to improve both its usability and its visibility. The author explains how to analyze logs and other system data to measure the effectiveness of the Web site design and search engine.

While it is common to report the percentage of minority and female students attending universities, it is rare to perform a detailed examination of the overall composition of the student body, particularly, the proportion of International students. It is the purpose of this study to examine the proportion of International Students by School from…

Using a national-level U.S. database, T. K. Shackelford (2001) calculated rates of uxoricide (the murder of a woman by her romantic partner) by relationship type (cohabiting or marital), by ages of the partners, and by the age difference between partners. Women in cohabiting relationships were 9 times more likely to be killed by their partner than…

An evaluation of the National Healthy School Standard (NHSS) was undertaken by the authors on behalf of the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Skills. One part of the evaluation involved gaining access to a number of datasets derived from previous research and analysing the health-related outcomes of schools which had…

This article offers an analysis of the process of error recovery as observed in the development and use of collections databases in a university museum. It presents results from a longitudinal case study of the development of collaborative systems and practices designed to reduce the number of errors found in the museum's databases as museum…